Jennifer Lipman

At the Ajex parade last month, shivering in the morning wind and watching Jewish veterans from around the UK fall in line, as they've done for decades, my eye was immediately drawn to the poppy wreaths shaped as Stars of David.

Something to be very proud of, I thought. What a striking image; a visual reminder of our community's enduring presence at the heart of British society.

"Hunger," says novelist Adele Geras, evoking life in besieged Jerusalem in 1948. "That's my main memory." Just four then, she vividly remembers sitting in the shelter at night hearing the guns, and later the victory parade.

Recalling the shortage of food, she describes how her uncle once managed to get his hands on a tin of sardines and sat all the cousins around their grandmother's big table.

Reading Claire Hajaj's novel took me back to when, last year, I spent Shavuot in Jerusalem, walking to the Old City at dawn against the cry of the Muslim call to prayer. This is the kind of book that Ishmael's Oranges is, one that conjures up the sights, smells and sounds of the Middle East as you turn the pages.

He is known for playing Sherlock Holmes - and it turns out that solving mysteries is a family tradition for Benedict Cumberbatch, whose great-great- grandfather helped thwart a 19th century blood libel.

There were high hopes for Friday Night Dinner when it began in 2011. After all, here was subject matter rife with comic potential, a talented ensemble including the always excellent Tamsin Greig and, in Robert Popper, a writer who was working off his own experiences of Shabbat meal mayhem in Edgware. What was not to like?

When you think about it, it comes as little surprise that Facebook was invented by a Jew. A site that encourages gossip, dismisses the need for privacy, and enables faraway relatives to meddle in the lives of the younger generation from anywhere in the world. Who but a Jew could have come up with that?

Oh, for the conviction of those who would boycott Israel. Forget about nuance or anguished deliberation, and bring on kneejerk condemnation the minute anyone creative does anything that suggests they might, vaguely, not dislike Israel.

When Thomas Harding phoned up the Imperial War Museum and asked whether, as he had recently been told, his German Jewish great-uncle might have brought one of the highest-ranking Nazi officers to justice, the woman on the other end of the line burst out laughing, doubtless imagining him to be a fantasist.

British Jews making aliyah this summer are facing delays and confusion because of industrial action by Israeli Foreign Ministry staff and “a total lack of communication” from the Jewish Agency in this country.

Employees at Israeli embassies around the world are into the third month of a dispute about pay and have suspended consular services, including the issuing of visas.

If Google’s tax arrangements are any guide, its London offices may be an illusion. So it is hardly surprising that getting to your desired floor can prove tricky. The lifts into the internet giant’s colourful Tottenham Court Road premises are bafflingly complex, controlled from the outside, like a time machine. But once in, there’s no mistaking where you are.

Sitting in a Hampstead cafe stirring his cup of tea, Douglas Villiers comes across as a relatively unassuming 76-year-old. White-haired, well-spoken and genial, he betrays not a trace of his Jewish immigrant lineage or of a life spent mixing with the wealthy, glamorous, and in some cases, infamous.

Prominent figures from culture and the media, including actress Zoë Wanamaker and former Times editor James Harding, will be welcomed to London’s new Jewish community centre when it opens later this year.

After a decade of anticipation, planning and construction, JW3 will formally open in north-west London’s Finchley Road on September 29.

It's a plot ready-made for a film classic, one Frank Capra himself could have written. Mr Smith goes to Berlin, perhaps. The major players in a certain industry have for decades cultivated an image of respectability, heroism, of being on the side of the little guy. But then one man exposes them as collaborators; villains working on the side of evil.

Could it be that Leonard Cohen is planning to mark the high holy days in the traditional manner this year?

To the delight of his Jewish fans, and in a decision that would no doubt have pleased his talmudic scholar grandfather, the Canadian star has changed the date of his upcoming London concert so that it no longer clashes with Yom Kippur.

In the two years since her premature death, interest in Amy Winehouse’s music and colourful life has hardly waned. A film is in the works. Her songs still receive plentiful airplay. And she continues to be cited as a cautionary tale on the perils of excess.